The SpaceX Hyperloop test track along Jack Northrop Avenue in Hawthorne will be the site of the Hyperloop II competition Aug. 25-27. SpaceX announced Friday that 24 teams of university students from across the country and world will compete to build and showcase the fatest pods for a futuristic transportation system capable of speeds of 300-700 mph.
File photo by Brad Graverson/The Daily Breeze/SCNG/01-19-17

SpaceX announced Friday that 24 teams of university engineering and business students will compete to build the fastest Hyperloop pod in the second competition of its kind outside its Hawthorne headquarters.

The races will take place Aug. 25-27 along Jack Northrop Avenue, where a nearly 1-mile-long vacuum-sealed tube was built last year to test the pods.

“Hyperloop Pod Competition II will focus on a single criterion: maximum speed,” SpaceX officials said in a statement Friday. “The competition’s goal is to accelerate the development of functional prototypes and encourage innovation by challenging teams to design and build the best high-speed pod.”

Participants in this competition include UC Santa Barbara, UC Irvine, CSU Sacramento, Purdue University, University of Texas at Austin, Colorado School of Mines, Princeton University, Virginia Tech and others around the country and world.

The fastest pod, built by Technical University of Munich, reached only 55 mph — far less than the goal of 300-700 mph. Other winners were Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

While SpaceX is hosting the competition, it’s not participating in the development of new Hyperloop technologies at all. Instead, CEO Elon Musk is providing support to help develop the technology he introduced in a 2013 white paper that described the basic principles of thrusting passenger pods through tubes at supersonic speeds.

Companies such as Los Angeles-based Hyperloop One and Hyperloop Transportation Technologies are developing the technology for commercial use.

Sandy Mazza is a freelancer. She previously worked for Southern California News Group as a city reporter covering Carson and Hawthorne and specializing in features about Los Angeles' growing Silicon Beach tech, bioscience, and aerospace sectors.